The 200-ton mountain of debris that fills the yard most weekday afternoons at Premier Recycle in San Jose comes from construction and demolition sites, and contains an unruly mix of broken sheetrock, discarded lumber, chunks of concrete laced with steel rebar and torn cardboard boxes.

These days, most of what’s hauled away from a construction or demolition site can be recycled. By the next morning, workers at Premier Recycle, which is located near the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, will have sorted the debris into recyclable piles of scrap metal, cardboard, plastics, wood and more, and the yard will be free for another couple of hundred tons of waste to arrive that day.

Recycled concrete can be used to build new road beds. Wood can become mulch or fuel; rigid plastics may be car parts someday. Recycling companies can sell some materials – metals and plastics, for example – while others they give away, or pay other companies to take. Clients range from local governments to farmers to manufacturing suppliers.

With nearly two dozen such facilities now on a city-certified list, San Jose has become a renowned center for construction-and-demolition recycling know-how, local practitioners say. The city’s 6-year-old program to help keep these materials out of landfills has been used as a model for other cities in California and internationally. And there are still opportunities for more construction trash to be turned into usable products.

“At the very beginning there was a little apprehension” among developers and haulers alike about how the city’s construction recycling program would work, said Rocky Hill, owner of Premier Recycle. His company, which hauled and recycled the debris from the construction of San Jose’s new City Hall, is permitted to handle up to 300 tons of waste a day. On a recent afternoon, workers wearing heavy gloves extracted wood scraps from a pile of debris while a colleague driving an excavator plucked up scrap metal. The day’s materials came from a Safeway remodel, a Cupertino high school remodel, and from a Yahoo job in Santa Clara, among other places.

As customers see that their debris is being successfully recycled, they’ve warmed up to the program, Hill said. “Most people found their costs are not getting added to, to do this. A lot of the developers and contractors and homeowners who use this … when they see that it really is being diverted from landfills, there is a good feeling about that.”

In 2001, the city of San Jose implemented a program requiring that most people – developers, contractors, homeowners – who obtain a building permit from the city pay a “construction demolition diversion deposit.” The deposit is based on square footage of the project, and rates start at 10 cents a square foot for new, non-residential construction.

Fees refunded

Later, those who provide a receipt showing that they hauled their waste to one of the city-certified recycling facilities get their deposit money back. To be certified, facilities must prove that they recycle at least 50 percent of the construction and demolition materials they take in.

Before the program began, only about 100,000 tons of “mixed” construction and demolition materials – those hauled off a job site without wood being separated from concrete, for example – were recycled each year at San Jose’s landfills, estimated Stephen Bantillo, commercial solid waste manager for the city’s Environmental Services department. Now about 500,000 tons of mixed materials are recycled.

According to figures gathered by the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board, San Jose diverted 62 percent of all its trash from landfills in 2004, the most recent year for which the board has completed its calculations. In the same year, San Francisco diverted 67 percent of its trash, and Oakland recycled 55 percent. The state does not compile figures on what percentage of construction and demolition materials is recycled. But more cities are developing programs similar to San Jose’s each year; the city recently hosted guests from Alberta, Canada, who wanted a tutorial on recycling construction and demolition materials.

“This is one of the most developed infrastructures for processing CND materials in the nation,” Bantillo said. The program has slowed the fill-up of San Jose’s landfills, driven down prices developers and homeowners pay to recycle construction and demolition materials, and, in creating a local market for recycled materials, avoided the need to truck materials to far-off processing plants, he said. But there is more to do, including finding economical ways to recycle carpeting and asphalt shingles locally.

The other challenge that’s emerged: Many people who pay the construction and demolition diversion deposit when they get their building permit are not coming back to get their refunds. In a 2004 customer satisfaction survey about the program, slightly more than half the respondents said they didn’t collect their refunds.

Refund reminders

“It really was a surprise for us,” Bantillo said, “We never anticipated that people weren’t going to ask for their money back.” Now, he said, the city sends customers letters to remind them they’ve paid a refundable deposit.

Gary Filizetti, president of Devcon, a large Milpitas construction firm, praised San Jose’s construction-and-demolition recycling program, saying “it’s made everybody a little bit more responsible” about recycling. “The incentive is there, you just have to remember to go get your fees back.”

Several miles away from Premier’s facility, near San Jose’s Alviso neighborhood, the Zanker Materials Processing Facility and nearby Zanker Road Landfill operate on a much larger scale. The two 72-acre sites are among the nation’s largest processing centers for construction and demolition debris. The processing facility can handle 135 tons of materials an hour, and recycles 95 percent of the materials it accepts. Scrap wood can be swiftly turned into landscaping mulch or wood chips for fueling co-generation energy plants. Leftover drywall becomes pristine white piles of agriculture-quality gypsum. The plant produces and sells up to 80 tons of scrap metal a day.

“We get people from all over the world coming to visit us,” says Michael Gross, who runs the two facilities. “Our market for recyclables is very good, and our community as a whole has a very good environmental consciousness.”

"I fully support the principles behind Senate Bill 1: to defeat efforts by the president and Congress to undermine vital federal protections that protect clean air, clean water and endangered species," Newsom said in a written statement.